A News Item Example – Giant Wombat Skeleton Found

English admin – learning English text types.  Again this is about example of news item text. A daily news presented to readers by the writers to show what happened. A journalists often use news item writing style when they presented news in magazines, news paper, Online media, etc. So if you want to practice as expert journalist, you can start right now to write a news item text

How a news item text is composed? Here is the headline when you make and write a news item text. The headline is what we call Generic Structure. Now we see the following sample first!
Example of  News Item Text – Giant Wombat Skeleton Found

Discovery of wombat sekeleton – news item sample

The fossil of a car sized mega-wombat has been unearthed in northern Australia, scientists said Wednesday. A relative of the modern-day wombat, the diprotodon skeleton was dug up in remote Queensland last week and scientists believe it could shed valuable light on the species’ demise.
Along with Australia’s other mega fauna,which included towering kangaroos and gigantic crocodiles, diprotodon became extinct around the same time that indigenous tribes first appeared. “There’s been a lot of debate about what killed the mega fauna and it’s quite a hot topic in paleontology,” Sue Hand, a professor on the team that made the discovery.
There could be some very interesting data to be extracted from the find.The animal was two metres tall (6 feet,six inches) and 3.5 metres (11 feet, six inches) long. It was the size of arhinoceros or a car, pigeon-toed and with a backward-facing pouch.
“They basically looked a lot like a wombat, a very big beefed-up wombat,much bigger than obviously anything that’s around today,” said Hand.

Note: this example of news item text is simplified from news.discovery.com
Generic Structure of News item Text in English

Now we see the structure of that above text. The structure is we call generic structure. The writer uses such structure to achieve his goal when he want to write. Determining the right writing structure is absolutely important to guarantee achieving the writing goal. So here is the generic structure:

1. Newsworthy event: It is said clearly that the main event is the discovery of giant wombat skeleton
The fossil of a car sized mega-wombat has been unearthed in northern Australia
2. Background events: There are some events which proceeded or follow the main event.
diprotodon became extinct around the same time that indigenous tribes first appeared.

The animal was two metres tall (6 feet,six inches) and 3.5 metres (11 feet, six inches) long.
3. Source: From where the writer have the information to validate the existence of the main event
“They basically looked a lot like a wombat, a very big beefed-up wombat,much bigger than obviously anything that’s around today,” said Hand.
So it is the example of news item about fossil discovery. Learning news item text gives 2 benefits. First is understanding the news which happened and the second is having a lot of vocabularies related broad topics.

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